The Narrator (29 page)

*

Clapper racket in our ears we begin our march to Cuttquisqui, which it has taken me most of the morning to discover is a little less than ten miles away. We have each received a kerchief of a dirty white color, peculiarly dingy and shiny at once, to put around our necks. These have been specially prepared, boiled in something that has made them stiff but imparted no smell to them, to protect us against “the influence.” It is likely the enemy have these as well—they have spells of their own.

Practically no horses to speak of on the island, in the end we are all, even Makemin, going on foot. Here and there we encounter rough spots where rock slides have cluttered the road with stones, but the route is mostly clear. An advance party of Specialists falls in with us two or three miles into the foothills, swelling our number to a little over a hundred, drifting down in sociable groups from a stand of trees where an elbow in the hills makes a shaded nook by the road. Silichieh immediately takes up with a pair of aristocratic officers who seem to float along in the dust, coming down arm in arm to meet us. The captain is an elfin man with tow curls and an excessively refined pink face. The lieutenant is more ruggedly built, with straight limbs and a broad flat body; he has brown curls and a slightly sallow complexion. Between these newcomers and Silichieh there is an insubstantial familiarity of incomplete acquaintance; they have served together, but had not had the opportunity then to become friends, so perhaps they will take another now. They converse in their own language, which I understand only imperfectly.

I can’t hear anything but the sounds we make ourselves. A sick, frightened feeling begins to seep into me. We march through silence, a smell of wet green plants, and something fainter beneath, like rust. The grass and scrub grows thinner as we proceed, and now we are in a place where there are only solitary trees, although the slopes are acrid with rich-looking black earth, packed firm. Where the soil is torn open, pale limestone curds bulge into the air like warts, but the exposed rocks along the path are ferrous, sparsely spotted with lichens and abrasive to touch.

“I wish we had a bit of a breeze. I’m starting to feel stifled,” Jil Punkinflake says.

“As long as it didn’t blow any of this grit into our faces,” I say, and Silichieh nods sagely at me. This brings me back into the circle of his companions, and as I look at them I keep seeing them coming down the declivity to us, kicking out their elegant legs, their heads flung grandly back.

The captain resumes his conversation with Silichieh, now speaking Alak. The lieutenant meanwhile has been asking Thrushchurl something, and now I hear him say “It’s the interior they’re really scared of.”

Thrushchurl turns his head in that direction, away from me. “The interior ...” he says softly.

“What have you heard about it?” Silichieh asks.

“That’s where all the ruins are, and the wilderness and the war. Something else there too, like gods, are there. No one goes in there. The people in town are frightened all this—” the lieutenant makes a vague gesture including us, the war, “—will elicit an answer from it. There’s already stirring inside, and any killing will stir it up more.”

“You really think so?”

“Oh sure,” he says. “How could that not attract attention?”

A cloying, flavorless dampness fills my nostrils. Only now do I notice the fog, dark as twilight, erasing the land. It’s so thick I can’t make out the end of our party.

“I have a riddle,” the lieutenant says. “Want to hear it?”

“I’d like to,” I say.

He bends a little forward, past Silichieh, to have a look at me.

“All right,” he says. He is smirking a little, and now this expands into a proper smile that suits him better. He holds out his hands to the road, and raises his eyes brightly up.

“There is nothing in this world you love like you love me. You would part with everything else you have before you part with me, though you need never worry I will ever forsake you. More than love, more than life, more than death, you love most of all.
What
am I?”

“Can I ask questions?”

“Until I say stop!”

“All right. Are you always with me?”

“Always, though you don’t always know me.”

“Are you a part of me?”

“You are a part of me, and I am someone else.”

“Are you a spirit?”

“I am a spirit, but all spirits are part of me. And gods.”

The captain rolls his eyes, grins at Silichieh.

“You’re not
time?”
I ask.

“I grow with time, and time often strengthens me.”

“Are you beauty?”

“I think I’m beautiful, but that’s not my name.”

“Virtue?”

“... That is not my name.” Very grand the way he refuses the contraction there.

“Honor?”

“All wise people do me honor. But I’m not wisdom, either—and you’re just running down a list, so stop now.”

“I give up.”

“My name is
fear.
”

*

Rattle of our gear against the quiet; Thrushchurl’s anthem, and unsmelly smell of the fog, not a trace of salt air in it, and suppressed under it is the smell of cakey black earth. The swaying shapes of marching soldiers, blue shadows against a low ceiling of fog and the dark crescent of the hillside above me. The captain, speaking in a clear ringing but not loud voice, is describing his great patriotic epic to me. Sounds awful.

“A complex book,” he says, “a sorcerer’s-apprentice book. A book of loneliness,” he adds with a wistful note. “It’s about a young man who is sent far away to a sanitarium in the mountains; he must learn there how to cure the plague that is destroying the people back in his home.”

He lapses into his original language, addressing himself to Silichieh, and then runs out of words. None of us has much attention to spare. We are less and less able to combat our awe in this still country. Even the loonies are. Thrushchurl’s singing has retreated under his breath.

Our muffled noise. An extensive white swatch of dim scales on the slopes ahead, looking like splashes of spilled milk. Presently we draw near, and the patches of white come down to the brink of the path. Even close up, the white is confused by the cloud of fog we’re engulfed in, so I have to step to the edge and stoop. Suddenly I can see clearly—tiny, incredibly regular flowers, growing low to the ground, each with six diamond-shaped petals. They aren’t white, finally, but a colorless, mother-of-pearl silver, like polished chips of fog. The petals are inflexibly hard, and when I reach to pick one, the thin stem bends stiffly in my fingers like wire, and won’t break.

“What’s that?” Jil Punkinflake knocks my back and points up the slope at something dark tumbling in among the flowers. I peer through the fog, and I can see a little almond-shaped head up there, and a few others besides.

“Those are hares,” I say.

“I’ve never seen one,” he says.

I wonder if, and if so how, they eat these mineral flowers.

“Look there!” and no sooner has he said this and pointed than Jil Punkinflake darts from the path, following the rocky bed of a shallow brook. Thrushchurl follows him avidly on his long legs. I hadn’t seen the brook at all, and now I can hardly believe it’s there. It flows without making a noise.

A rounded arm lies in the stream, the water bulging around it. The dog stands attentively beside me. Jil Punkinflake says something I don’t catch, facing away from me and still advancing toward the arm, then repeats it over his shoulder.

“It doesn’t look real,” he says.

They both bend and loom in, faces first. Jil Punkinflake picks up the arm, and then stands, holding it by the elbow.

“It’s fake,” he says in a loud voice, looking back at us.

Thrushchurl, grinning or squinting, looks to us and echoes his words. “It’s fake.”

Jil Punkinflake shows me the arm. The flesh is spongy stuff over a hard core, neatly sectioned at the shoulder, with a white bulb of bone protruding. The bulb has four identical, deep grooves cut into it. I turn the hand over and examine it. The slender, womanly fingers close on mine and hold me with gentle pressure, frigid from the icy water of the stream that still trembles in droplets on the blue milk skin. The sensation shakes me. There’s something frighteningly enticing about it, and at the same time I want to drop the arm or fling it away from me.

Silichieh begins looking at its articulations.

Ahead, Makemin’s voice, flat and strict.

“Come on. Leave it.”

“I think they used to put artificial people near crossroads markers,” Silichieh says, and his voice seems to plummet in strength during the brief journey from his diaphragm to his mouth. “We should look for markers.”

Makemin nods and turns into dark fog. Scouts are sent probing around in the silence ahead. The road here is vague in the shallow breadth of a dip between hills and it isn’t entirely clear which way in the fog to go.

Hooting from one of the scouts, an asylum man. Silichieh dashes forward to examine a small shrine that stands above a V in the ground as thin and meager as a fold in a linen top sheet—the fork in the road, it seems. The shrine is a metal cage on a squat, undulating pillar of the same material, about three feet high. The cage is square, with flat bars, and topped with an acute dome. Inside the cage a polished steel ball rolls back and forth in a groove with pinched-up sides, making a grating stone scraping sound. Why hadn’t we heard that? Makemin bids me look for writing. I find none. Silichieh is fascinated by the movement of the ball. He thinks it is not perennial, but starts when someone approaches, and that its movement or sound are articulate in some way. Drawing a knife from the pocket of his sweater, Silichieh tries to probe at the ball, but his knife point stops with a click in between the slats. He taps there twice.

“Glass—so clear I couldn’t see it at all,” he says.

I’m the last to take my turn peering into the cage. When I look at the ball, which is clouded over with a scoring of fine scratches, but still reflective, I don’t see my face. The ball reflects the hills, the landscape behind me, but there is no face staring where mine ought to be. There is no one on the road.

*

The scouts report the lower peters out after only a few hundred yards in heaps of broken glass and rubbery black slag. We take the higher fork.

After not more than forty minutes of climbing, our heads begin to turn and scan into the blank—we’re hearing a sound, the first we haven’t caused in a long while. What is that steady groan?

A metallic odor, sharp like vinegar, is woven in with the fog here. The groan and the scent come out from a crevasse in the seam between two hills. The opening is sheer and narrow, and the chasm shows no bottom. Its sides are smooth, and faceted in narrow vertical strips, all angles with no curves; the surfaces are all unnaturally flat and smooth as pressed steel, the color of glass smoked almost opaque. Light seems to penetrate it a little, to gleam in the edges of the facets, and there is a sullen glow down deep inside, creeping up but without even slightly illuminating the black center of the pit, from which the groaning comes. The sound is like the legend of the mines. One side of the crevasse is higher than the other, and separate stones ranging in size from pebbles to rocks half my size cling inexplicably to the faceted surfaces, as though invisible hands held them there. Silichieh volunteers to clamber down to the crevasse and pry loose one of these hovering rocks, and Makemin turns him down only after a long thought.

We make our way past, and as one man we tend toward the opposite side of the path.

Now there’s grumbling coming from up ahead.

“What now?” the captain asks irritably.

A rockfall—a detail gets busy at once clearing it. I’m not in the detail. Silichieh is poring over the face from which the rocks fell, looking to see if anything interesting is exposed, and I drift past him into the brush for reasons of my own.

Something drags at me—the sensation is impossible to describe—it’s as though hooks have snagged all over the front of my uniform, and a single even strength pulls on them all equally and steadily. Despite myself I stagger with the pull, and now my eyes pick out a seam of bright blue silver in the shade of the stones. I allow myself to draw nearer, leaning back now against the pull.

A piece of lightning lies on the ground where the rock face bares itself out of the soil. It gleams with reflected light: a hair-slender forking line. The clay around it stands out dark and broken, so this must be something the falling rocks exposed.

Thrushchurl gasps at my side, gazing at it. He kneels, taking up a stick, and cudgels some of the loose stone aside. The pull strengthens so that I double forward—then fling myself back and push with my legs. It’s the metal I’m carrying that is pulled. Thrushchurl’s tentative digging has exposed a thicker limb of that same blue silver from which the forks emerge. It looks like the blades of ice that are first to form on still water in winter. Thrushchurl carefully extends his stick to prod the thicker limb, and to my amazement the metal yields like water. Thrushchurl makes a strangling noise, and I take hold of his shoulder and start dragging him away. His astonishment seems to have made him inert as a doll. I don’t like this blue silver’s unwholesome aura or its insistent appetite for my metal. I tell him and myself that we ought to find Silichieh, but the way is clear now and we are brusquely ordered to fall in.